travel report 16: welcome to Myanmar

Before traveling to a place like Myanmar I, and most every other visitor probably does this, had to answer the question if I am comfortable being in a country that is being run like a bad version of a middle age fiefdom. Some people think that it is bad; some people think its good; only very few people travel to Myanmar these days who do not think about this question at all. In fact not many people travel there at the moment. I wonder what pissed the traveling masses off more, the response to Nagris or to the protesting monks. Obviously, I think that it is fine to travel the Golden Land. I’s here, ain’t I? These days it is easy to spread the wealth to those who need it (most all of them) and keep it away from those that should not get it. Of course, I and my uncle Volker were only too happy that the tourist hordes where kept away by their 15 minutes of disgust. Although this by all means does not mean that my 15 minutes were perceptibly any longer. This rather complicated unthought process strangely puts one in an unbiased situation on arrival, as opposed to a state of complete readiness to hand out fliers and start revolutions on behalf of the sodden downtrodden.

To drive into Yangon and be welcomed by the below sign, does put one in mind of certain Eastern European Shenanigans designed to keep the foreigners unsuspecting and the locals in awe. Remind me to show you that other one, that I saw at another time.


In any case, I felt welcome, not so much by the sign, but much more so by dear Natalie and her Nephew Jimmy, two friends of the family who live in Yangon to do business.


This is Jimmy. His business in Yangon is school. I can not emphasize enough how important it is to have friends in this lovely country. I mean who else would exchange my crappy, torn and smelly dollar bills? Certainly not the Burmese Govt Exchange. They only take the crispest and newest 50/100 USD bills. And not those with a C at the start of the serial number. In exchange for your amazingly clean 100 dollar bills, you get the Kyat equivalent of one hundred crappy, torn and smelly 1 dollar bills in return. Do this with 500 dollar and soon you feel rich , and not just because you are in a land where you can kill people by throwing supersized Avocados at them - everything grows here, the country is a benign fungus - but also because you are carrying a wad of money that Al Capone would have given to his muscle for lugging around. To mention any more about the incredible hospitality offered to Volker and I by Natalie and Jimmy would be to state the obvious, so I leave it at saying that it felt like home.

In Yangon I was as usual the only one, me and all the other white people, who was walking around the place. Asians do not walk. They ride their bicycles, they stack 4 on a moped and how graceful it is to see two girls perching on their seats, one with legs to right, one with legs to left, with no worries in the world that they might fall. Even though the rascal driving them around town thinks he is Schumacher on a Duccati these girls are a sight to behold. Maybe it is actually because of. But they never walk. They stack on backs of pickups, on Buses like sardines, on roofs of whatever is moving down the road. But walk, they do not. When they all get as developed as they seem to desire to be I fear for their little colesterolique hearts. Also, two little fatassed asian chicas won't fit on a moped anymore.

The Locals are completely, overwhelmingly interested in talking to you. For no other reason than that you are foreign. George Bush would do great here, really low expectations. Makes you wonder why everyone talks about that Obama has it so hard because everyone has high expectations. Hell yeah, we do, I have low expectations of my pet cockroach, figure the Prez deserves a little better. Yes, being foreign is plenty, and supposedly we are all rich as well, but that only applies to other people, not me. Some of the people that want to chat to you are very quickly and obviously interested in selling you some kind of service. But most of the people that will strike up a conversation do so out of pure interest. Some of them are probably spies and you will notice this when they ask you rather curious detail oriented questions, "So the Korean that you stay with, she is a woman right?" But even those guys are rather easy to spot, and to make some sport of.

Once you have surmounted all of these rather small hurdles, you will find a genuinely friendly, tourism uncorrupted - yes, yes, I am one of them, but I have far too little money and even fewer needs to be corrupting -, constantly laughing and smiling folk which makes it hard to believe the torture horror stories that are told on dark nights. You must either start to question the effectiveness of the burmese government's methods or you must wonder at the sanity of these people. How can they keep smiling like this? There are enough examples of ugly dictators with their ugly dogs of war. In all of these places one can see the sad fruit of their labors. If you ever visited any part of eastern europe behind their curtain, you would know what a sad supressed looking person looks like. But in the Golden Land, one is by default looked upon with a smile.

However our thoughts of Buddhism; However our conceptions of the Burmese work ethic; However wasted we, with our 2000 year old churches, think it is to goldplate another Stupa; However any of our opinions fall on any of these issues we must appreciate the smile that remains like Max Plank.